Perhaps you’re reading this newspaper in a cafĂ© in downtown St. Albert. Maybe you’re riding the bus. You might even be reading it at your kitchen table having your morning coffee.
No matter where you are, though, chances are you’re within a five-minute walk of one or more treasure troves you didn’t even know existed. There probably aren’t any wooden chests filled with gold, but for the people who hunt these treasures that’s entirely beside the point.
For geocachers, as these treasure hunters are known, the thrill is in the chase.
St. Albert resident Ron Harvie has found his fair share of geocaches, and has planted several of his own for other like-minded treasure seekers to find. He does it for many reasons, but above he said it’s just a great reason to get up off the couch.
“There’s so much technology – phones, videogames, computers – to keep people inside it’s getting harder and harder in general to find an excuse to get out anyways,” he said. “Geocaching is kind of like an IT rehab.”
In the St. Albert area, there are enough hidden treasures around to satisfy a geocacher for a long, long time. The website geocaching.com lists more than 1,200 different caches within a 10 miles (16 km) of the city. There are a staggering 2.6 million worldwide.
They range in size from tiny, about the size of an eraser on a pencil, and large, which would be about the size of a coffee container. Some are relatively easy to find and others are made in such a way as to be extremely difficult.
What they all have in common is that their specific geographic co-ordinates are listed on the website, and geocachers must use some method to figure out where those co-ordinates exist in the real world.
Harvie explained in the beginning days of geocaching, GPS devices were quite rare if they were accessible at all. Smart phones and geocaching apps have made it much easier. Before that, people would use a pen and paper to write down the coordinates, they would then head out with a compass and a length of rope to find the spot using pre-digital orienteering techniques.
But finding the cache itself is often only half the battle. It’s not enough to just find the treasure, but you also have to be reasonably secretive about it so the muggles don’t spot you. In this context we’re not talking about the non-magical folk in the Harry Potter universe, but the non-geocaching folk in this one.
A non-geocacher might not be respectful of a cache if they find it, Harvie explained, so sometimes you have to be patient even if it means lurking near a spot in a ravine and getting “the creepy feeling trying to look not-dangerous to a group of moms and kids.”
Once you find the cache and ensure there are no muggles around, then, it should be clear sailing. Maybe.
Some caches are simple boxes that can be easily opened, typically full of small knick-knacks that geocachers can trade for a knick-knack of their own and a log sheet to record your name and date you found the cache, but others are a bit trickier.
One cache in St. Albert, for example, is hidden in a birdhouse, and there’s a bit of a puzzle to solve before you can find the cache itself. It’s a small cache, so it contains only a tiny slip of paper where geocachers record their initials and date.
But even that one is easy in comparison to some caches out there. Harvie described one cache he found in Central Alberta – he didn’t want to be too specific so as not to ruin the hunt for other geocachers – that was so cleverly hidden he nearly didn’t find it.
“On the bottom of a sign was the concrete thing on the ground, with bolts sticking out the bottom,” he said. “I noticed one side had five and the other side only had four. I started wiggling it, and it came off and sure enough there was a magnet on it. They put the geocache inside the bolt and stuck it there.”
For Harvie the biggest appeal of geocaching is having a good excuse to get outside and explore the world. He works lengthy shifts out of town working on oil wells, and in his down time he either finds a fishing spot or goes out geocaching.
But it has also been a great way to spend time outside with his kids, who have also taken an interest. Mitchell, 11, explained it’s a great way to spend time with his dad when, for example, the girls want to go shopping.
“Sometimes we go looking for them, because the point is to have fun searching for it,” he said. “But sometimes we’re just by some place when my mom and sister would go shopping. Me and my dad would go find one.”
His most memorable find in a geocache was a travel bug, which is a small trinket with a serial number on it that geocachers are meant to take from one cache and put it into another.
“People will put a certain object into the cache, and it has a code on it,” Mitchell said. “The trick is to get it across the world as fast as you can – putting it into geocaches so another person finds it, and then another one, then it gets across the world or across the country.”
If you input that serial number into the website, it will show you how far the bug has travelled. Mitchell said he made one that has gone as far as Ontario, while Ron said a travel bug that was once on Vancouver Island is now in Egypt, which really brings home the fact this is a worldwide community of hobbyists.
While registration on the website is free, information about some caches is available only to premium members, but Harvie said he thinks it’s a small price to pay.
“I’m getting a world-wide tour guide for $30 a year,” he said. “If somebody didn’t live here and had never been here but was geocacher, well, it forces them to look around.”
